The Monetary Origins of the ‘Price Revolution’ : South German Silver Mining, Merchant- Banking, and Venetian Commerce, 1470-1540'

This paper seeks to provide a new and chiefly monetary explanation for the origins of the sixteenth-centuryera of sustained inflation (c.1520 - c.1640) commonly known as the ‘Price Revolution’; and in particular itprovides an answer to the question: not, as traditionally posed, why did the Price Revolution commence soearly; but rather why did it commence so late? Beginning with the Salamanca School (1556), and then theFrench philosopher Jean Bodin (1568) and culminating with Earl Hamilton and Keynes (1929, 1936), mosteconomists and historians had attributed this sustained European inflation to the influx of Spanish-American‘treasure’, chiefly silver from Peru-Bolivia and Mexico. But with advances in our knowledge of price historyin the post-war era, economic historians pointed out that European inflation had commenced as early as the1520s, some three decades before any substantial amounts of silver had been imported from the Americas.They therefore sought an alternative explanation: unfortunately, one that wrongly made population growththe ‘prime mover’ for inflation, with grave deficiencies in their economic theory. Most have confused achange in relative prices (e.g. a rise in wheat prices) with a change in the overall price level (CPI). Only one(Jack Goldstone) has sought to link population growth, and urbanization in particular, to monetary variables:i.e. to changes in payment structures and thus to the income velocity of money (or to changes in Cambridgek). This paper focuses on the role of two other monetary factors, both of which preceded any sustainedpopulation growth in western Europe: the South-German silver-copper mining boom, commencing in the late1450s, and reaching its peak in the 1530s; and then the revolutionary changes in credit institutions from c.1510: in particular legal sanctions for and widespread use of negotiable, transferable bills; and the rapid riseof fully negotiable rentes as the principal agency for West European public finance, with an explosiveexpansion in the use of credit instruments in general. The other argument of this paper is that the SouthGerman silver mining boom did not initially, not before c. 1515-20, produce sustained inflation in westernEurope for four reasons: (1) much of the silver (and copper) so produced was exported by the Venetians tothe Levant, in purchasing Asian luxuries, until major conquests of the Ottoman Turks seriously disrupted thistrade, c. 1515-20, diverting much more of that silver to the Antwerp market; (2) increased European moneysupplies from the silver-mining boom merely accommodated the revival and expansion of the Europeaneconomy from the 1460s to c. 1510 (i.e., in terms of the equation M.V = P.y, that ) (M.V) > ) y ); (3) thatreally large quantities of silver were not being mined before about 1510; (4) that the institutional changesin credit, and their impact on changes in both M and V, did not make themselves felt until after the 1520s.

and Venetian Commerce, 1470-1540'

John H. MunroDepartment of EconomicsUniversity of Toronto

This paper seeks to provide a new and chiefly monetary explanation for the origins of the sixteenth-centuryera of sustained inflation (c.1520 - c.1640) commonly known as the ‘Price Revolution’; and in particular itprovides an answer to the question: not, as traditionally posed, why did the Price Revolution commence soearly; but rather why did it commence so late? Beginning with the Salamanca School (1556), and then theFrench philosopher Jean Bodin (1568) and culminating with Earl Hamilton and Keynes (1929, 1936), mosteconomists and historians had attributed this sustained European inflation to the influx of Spanish-American‘treasure’, chiefly silver from Peru-Bolivia and Mexico. But with advances in our knowledge of price historyin the post-war era, economic historians pointed out that European inflation had commenced as early as the1520s, some three decades before any substantial amounts of silver had been imported from the Americas.They therefore sought an alternative explanation: unfortunately, one that wrongly made population growththe ‘prime mover’ for inflation, with grave deficiencies in their economic theory. Most have confused achange in relative prices (e.g. a rise in wheat prices) with a change in the overall price level (CPI). Only one(Jack Goldstone) has sought to link population growth, and urbanization in particular, to monetary variables:i.e. to changes in payment structures and thus to the income velocity of money (or to changes in Cambridgek). This paper focuses on the role of two other monetary factors, both of which preceded any sustainedpopulation growth in western Europe: the South-German silver-copper mining boom, commencing in the late1450s, and reaching its peak in the 1530s; and then the revolutionary changes in credit institutions from c.1510: in particular legal sanctions for and widespread use of negotiable, transferable bills; and the rapid riseof fully negotiable rentes as the principal agency for West European public finance, with an explosiveexpansion in the use of credit instruments in general. The other argument of this paper is that the SouthGerman silver mining boom did not initially, not before c. 1515-20, produce sustained inflation in westernEurope for four reasons: (1) much of the silver (and copper) so produced was exported by the Venetians tothe Levant, in purchasing Asian luxuries, until major conquests of the Ottoman Turks seriously disrupted thistrade, c. 1515-20, diverting much more of that silver to the Antwerp market; (2) increased European moneysupplies from the silver-mining boom merely accommodated the revival and expansion of the Europeaneconomy from the 1460s to c. 1510 (i.e., in terms of the equation M.V = P.y, that ) (M.V) > ) y ); (3) thatreally large quantities of silver were not being mined before about 1510; (4) that the institutional changesin credit, and their impact on changes in both M and V, did not make themselves felt until after the 1520s.

The Monetary Origins of the ‘Price Revolution’ : South German Silver Mining, Merchant-Banking,and Venetian Commerce, 1470-1540'

John H. MunroDepartment of EconomicsUniversity of TorontoThis paper seeks to provide a new and chiefly monetary explanation for the origins of the sixteenth-centuryera of sustained inflation (c.1520 - c.1640) commonly known as the ‘Price Revolution’; and in particular it provides an answer to the question:

not,

as traditionally posed, why did the Price Revolution commence soearly; but rather why did it commence so late? Beginning with the Salamanca School (1556), and then theFrench philosopher Jean Bodin (1568) and culminating with Earl Hamilton and Keynes (1929, 1936), mosteconomists and historians had attributed this sustained European inflation to the influx of Spanish-American‘treasure’, chiefly silver from Peru-Bolivia and Mexico. But with advances in our knowledge of price historyin the post-war era, economic historians pointed out that European inflation had commenced as early as the1520s, some three decades before any substantial amounts of silver had been imported from the Americas.They therefore sought an alternative explanation: unfortunately, one that wrongly made population growththe ‘prime mover’ for inflation, with grave deficiencies in their economic theory. Most have confused achange in relative prices (e.g. a rise in wheat prices) with a change in the overall price level (CPI). Only one(Jack Goldstone) has sought to link population growth, and urbanization in particular, to monetary variables:i.e. to changes in payment structures and thus to the income velocity of money (or to changes in Cambridge

k).

This paper focuses on the role of two other monetary factors, both of which preceded any sustained population growth in western Europe: the South-German silver-copper mining boom, commencing in the late1450s, and reaching its peak in the 1530s; and then the revolutionary changes in credit institutions from c.1510: in particular legal sanctions for and widespread use of negotiable, transferable bills; and the rapid riseof fully negotiable

rentes

as the principal agency for West European public finance, with an explosiveexpansion in the use of credit instruments in general. The other argument of this paper is that the SouthGerman silver mining boom did not initially, not before c. 1515-20, produce sustained inflation in westernEurope for four reasons: (1) much of the silver (and copper) so produced was exported by the Venetians tothe Levant, in purchasing Asian luxuries, until major conquests of the Ottoman Turks seriously disrupted thistrade, c. 1515-20, diverting much more of that silver to the Antwerp market; (2) increased European moneysupplies from the silver-mining boom merely accommodated the revival and expansion of the Europeaneconomy from the 1460s to c. 1510 (i.e., in terms of the equation M.V = P.y, that

)

(M.V) >

)

y ); (3) thatreally large quantities of silver were not being mined before about 1510; (4) that the institutional changesin credit, and their impact on changes in both M and V, did not make themselves felt until after the 1520s.

JEL Classifications:

E3, E5, E6; F4; G2; H5, H6; N1, N2, N7

1

Marjorie Grice-Hutchinson,

The School of Salamanca: Readings in Spanish Monetary Theory, 1544- 1605

(Oxford, 1952): Appendix III, p. 95: ‘And even in Spain, in times when money was scarcer, saleablegoods and labour were given for very much less than after the discovery of the Indies, which flooded thecountry with gold and silver’.

2

George A. Moore, ed.,

The Response of Jean Bodin to the Paradoxes of Malestroit and The Paradoxes, translated from the French Second Edition, Paris 1578

The Monetary Origins of the ‘Price Revolution’ :South German Silver Mining, Merchant-Banking, and Venetian Commerce, 1470-1540'

John H. MunroUniversity of Toronto....................................................For almost four centuries, the influx of Spanish-American silver had been viewed as the primaryculprit responsible for the inflation of the Price Revolution era in early modern Europe, a sustained rise inalmost all prices, lasting well more than a century: in England, a seven-fold increase by the later 1640s (seeTable 1). Such a view was first espoused during the Price-Revolution era itself, first indeed, within Spainitself, in a treatise that the cleric Azpilcueta Navarra, of the Salamanca School, produced in 1556 .

1

Muchmore famous, however, is the debate that took place twelve years later (1568), between the FrenchPhilosopher Jean Bodin and his opponent the royal councillor Jean Cherruyt de Malestroit: in the